NEW YORK, NY.- Olney Gleason presents Ali Banisadr: Noble/Savage, at 509 West 27th Street, New York. Spanning new paintings, bronze sculptures, and works on paper, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition explores Banisadr’s singular vision as iterated through a range of media.

Banisadr follows an instinctual approach to color and brushwork, informed by visionary representations of inner and outer landscapes by artists including Bruegel, Goya, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Burchfield, and Jackson Pollock. Having recently established a studio in the forests of Hudson Valley New York, several paintings in the exhibition bear the influence of the environment’s density and green palette. For Banisadr, the forest is both a force of nature and a site of metamorphosis. It lies just beyond the boundaries of consciousness, a place one stumbles into as into a daydream, where bearings are lost and instincts surface. Yet it is also the reservoir of civilization itself, supplying the very materials from which human worlds are built.

The exhibition’s title critiques the archetype of the “noble savage” as a mythology that continues to underpin modern thought. Informed by Banisadr’s close study of the writings of Edward Said, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cormac McCarthy and George Orwell, and American anthropologist David Graeber, among others, it points to the layers of misconception that have continued to obscure our relationship to nature. Instead, Banisadr’s work represents the natural world as a site of metamorphosis where history, memory, and imagination converge.

Ali Banisadr (b. 1976, Tehran) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MFA from New York Academy of Art (2007) and a BFA from School of Visual Arts, New York (2005). He has staged solo exhibitions at the Katonah Museum of Art (2025), Museo Stefano Bardini and Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (2021), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2020), Benaki Museum, Athens (2020), Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2019) and Het Noordbrabants Museum, Netherlands (2019), among other venues. He has participated in group exhibitions at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023), Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2021), Asia Society, New York (2021), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2017), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), and elsewhere. His work resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, British Museum, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, among other museums.